


Suffering Yet Hoping All Things

by StarlingGirl



Category: Fortitude (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-30
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2019-04-14 23:11:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14146683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarlingGirl/pseuds/StarlingGirl
Summary: Eugene should have died, up there in the snow with his blood spilled around him like something toxic. Dan should have let him die.Instead, Dan told him the truth, and let him live. Which is nice, except that he's got a hole in his stomach the size of a fist, and a heavy truth like a stone in his gut, and Fortitude still wants nothing more than to tear itself apart, up here in the cold where no-one can stand in its way. Not even Dan.





	Suffering Yet Hoping All Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shouldgowork](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shouldgowork/gifts).



> Just a little what-if I drabbled some time ago for my fellow Fortitude loser, a little improved and expanded for the internet. Pre-slash, if you squint. Might expand it, if I get around to re-watching S1 anytime soon.

"Gird your hearts with silent fortitude, suffering yet hoping all things."  
           —Felicia Hemans

* * *

 

Eugene remembers enough to recall bits and pieces of their conversation. He remembers telling Dan not to move him. He remembers promising that someone else will come. He remembers asking for the truth, and getting it.

But most of all he remembers the pain. The pain and the cold and the sight of all his blood, spread ugly on the clean, white snow like an oil slick, like something toxic.

They say that the human brain can’t recall the sensation of pain. They’re fucking liars.

And now it’s just this: the dull, heavy weight of the morphine — more morphine? The same morphine? He’s not sure — and the smell of a hospital room. Even that’s not quite right, though, just another thing that Fortitude can’t manage correctly. It’s not sharp enough, and it smells, ever-so-faintly, of disuse under the disinfectant.

Maybe it won’t be the hole in his gut that kills him. Maybe it’ll be an infection. Wouldn’t that be ironic, somehow? To die because not enough people here get sick for the hospital to keep up with its standards. Fuckers.

He drifts back towards sleep, and he dreams of eighteen full body-bags. This time, it’s not pieces of strangers in them — it’s all these people, the people of Fortitude. Bombing would have been a mercy. Better than watching them tear themselves apart.

When he wakes, it’s a slow and rippling return to consciousness. The slow understanding that he is not dead. His surroundings impress themselves lazily against his awareness, until he’s awake enough to understand the shape of the hospital room, and to recognise the man who’s sitting by his bedside.

“You saved me.” Eugene’s voice is cracked and broken, struggling to piece itself together. He’s thirsty like he’s never been thirsty before. He needs water, cool and fresh. He _wants_ alcohol, something strong and neat, something that tastes like it might disinfect the creeping stain of Fortitude from his blood.

Dan doesn’t look up from where he’s sat, elbows on his knees and head bowed, but he does laugh. A short, uncheerful thing.

“You’re welcome.”

“You’ll note that I didn’t actually thank you.”

Eugene’s stomach hurts. His fingers hurt. His head, too. Everything hurts, and he knows the truth, and for some reason that hurts as well. Dan circles the fingers of one hand around the wrist of the other for a moment. Imagining how the cuffs will feel when they arrest him, perhaps. Eugene licks his lips, dry tongue against dry skin. He tastes sour. Tastes of something that’s already rotting.

“It’s my job,” Dan says, and looks up at last. He seems to dislike what he sees, and his gaze skitters away again without lingering. Like walking on ice. Like he himself has been doing since he got here. He wasn’t built for this arctic, frigid place and its lunacy. “To save people. That’s my job.”

Yes, Eugene thinks, and isn’t it getting away with you? It’s easy enough to save people from the ice, from the cold, from the hungry polar bears. Harder to save them from each other. Hardest of all to save them from themselves.

“It’s _my_ job to find the truth,” Eugene says. He coughs, and his stomach spasms with pain, tension radiating abruptly through his muscles. It takes a long minute for him to force them to relax, to breathe through the pain. Dan doesn’t seem to notice, still fixing his gaze anywhere except the man in the hospital bed next to him.

“Yes,” he agrees, evenly.

“And now I have it.”

“Yes.”

A silence between them. Eugene watches Dan, and tries to put a name to the shape of things that he feels when he does. Pity, and frustration. Horror, at what he knows. Empathy, of a sort. If he’d heard the story on day one, he might not have felt that. Funny, what sitting on the same side of the table can do. The difference sharing a few drinks makes. But in the end, he can't stand Fortitude, and Dan is so tied up in the place, so central to its existence, that despite anything else, that thread of strong resentment remains. Now more than ever, after what he knows. He's here for a reason, and turns out, that reason is Dan.

“I was sent here to find out about Billy Pettigrew. If I leave before I do— If I _die_ —”

Dan makes a noise that Eugene doesn’t take the time to decipher, barrelling on through this fucking mess because he’s tired and he’s not sure how much of his insides are still inside him. Can’t imagine getting back to London like this — can barely imagine ever getting out of this bed.

“—then someone else will come. I have to tell them, Dan. I have to.”

Another long pause, cavernous in its silence, and Dan closes his eyes, drops his head and shakes it. Fingers drag down over a face more haggard than it was mere weeks ago.

“I know,” he says, at last. Bleak. His shrug and its accompanying smile are wry, all too aware of the irony in his words. “I couldn’t let you die. Not in my town.”

The laugh that’s surprised from Eugene only makes his pain flare sharper before it settles back down. He half-imagines he can feel a puff of air from the hole in his stomach. He’s leaking, like a faulty hose.

 _Not in my town._ Fortitude is slipping away from Dan like river-water through his fingers, but he only keeps clutching tighter. Like he might be able to save it. If he doesn’t miss his guess, the sheriff’s badge might be the only thing keeping Dan sane. Even then, it’s not exactly a foregone conclusion.

“Not in your town,” he repeats. Something like exasperation in his voice.

“Didn’t they tell you? Dying here, it’s against the law.”

Eugene smiles again, too tired for another laugh. Dan smiles too, but it falters and fades just as fast as it appears. At least now, Dan’s found it in him to raise his gaze, to keep it fixed on Eugene’s own.

“I’ll endeavour to hold off on that one, then,” Eugene says, and for a moment it’s his old, easy sarcasm, not exactly cruel but not exactly kind. For a moment, they’re back at that bar, uneasy allies who want to be enemies, or perhaps uneasy enemies who want to ally.

Dan’s next words are a surprise.

“Could you do that? For me?”  
  
“Not die?”  
  
“Hold off. Until— there’s something going on here. Something bigger than Billy Pettigrew. We’re all in danger and I need— I _have_ to—”

Dan trails off. There’s anger in him, simmering just below the surface—the same anger too that boils in Eugene’s own veins, rage at this place, at these events, at things which refuse to be made fucking sense of—but for now, it’s hopeless.

“Okay.” A measured response. Dan doesn’t believe him, frowns.

“Okay?”

“Okay,” he repeats. “Fortitude needs its sheriff.”

There's no gratitude, no thanks. At least, not in words; Dan nods, once, before he stands, and then he turns to go, snags up his rifle from where it had been leaning against a chair and swings it over his shoulder. Eugene thinks, he could have killed me. So many opportunities to let me die, and he wouldn’t.

He finds himself wondering whether there are wind chimes outside Dan’s house, the old memory thrown up without permission, morphine creating tidal eddies in his mind that he has no control over. He pushes the thought away, confused by it.

“Dan.”

He turns back.

“This is a temporary reprieve.” _I can’t keep this a secret forever._ “This isn’t clemency.”

“I don’t need clemency,” Dan says, and this time when he smiles there’s something dangerous at its edges, something sharp and cold and wild like the glacier and the ice and the bleak, wides horizons of this place. “I just need time.”

And then he’s gone, and Eugene is left alone in a not-quite-right hospital room. He cranes his neck to look out of the window— pain, pain, more pain— and sees fresh snow dancing down through the slanting yellow glow of the streetlamps.

Fuck it, Eugene thinks, trembling fingers reach for the button that’ll up his morphine. Fuck it, it would have been a kindness if he’d left me to die.


End file.
